“... deliberately put about in order to persuade or mislead. The poet, we are invited to conclude, may have chosen to appear bluff, insular and faux-xenophobic (or just xenophobic), but he wasn’t really like that, or at least there was a lot more to him than that, and the ‘more’ included the subtler, knowing self who was responsible for designing the ...”

“... from between the fourth pre-molar (or wolf-tooth) and the corner incisor in the lower jaw. They may reach a foot in length, although eight inches is more common. Xenophon warns of their heat: the angrier the boar the hotter they become. The tusks of the boar of Kalydon, displayed first in the temple of Athene at Tegea in Arcadia and later in Rome, were ...”

“... the nature of political systems, the psychology of leaders. What precipitates a conflict, though, may be a sudden, unforeseen event: an accident, misreading or miscalculation, or a temperamental leader’s flash of hubris. Often, of course, it is a combination of such things. Yet there is nothing inevitable about the outbreak of conflict. (Bear in mind when I ...”

“... the fiasco as Churchill. Nonetheless, it hung round his neck like an albatross for decades, and may have influenced other of his policies, though not in the same way that trench warfare had. Churchill was the leading figure among those who believed that it had almost worked, and would have done but for poor commanders in the field, cowardly troops and some ...”

“... of the 20th century, exercises such as Løvborg’s had come to seem ridiculous. Today, the tide may be turning again. The probable lines of humanity’s future were heavily trailed in the last chapter of Sapiens, which Harari has expanded to form the core of Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. As he tells it, our species has done great things already ...”

“... more modest way, the ‘long awaited motorists’ driving manual’ 1288 (BBS, 317 pp., £18.99, 3 May 2000, 1 903029 00 7) by Derek Bracegirdle subverts certain assumptions, too. (I don’t understand the title.) The book, ‘probably the most exciting, enthralling and entertaining driver’s compendium ever to reach the bookstand’, has been ‘compiled ...”

“... ashamed of itself . . . If this is the future of Brit Lit, gawd help us all.’ Be that as it may, Pelevin should anyway be looking over his other shoulder, as the comic-strip Anna Karenina blasts its way into the 21st century, to a generally horrified reception. Ilya Tolstoy, the novelist’s great-great-grandson, has said he can’t believe it’s a ...”

“... of memory, scalded into a state of permanent vigilance (‘never again’). Such high-alert modes may only be for groups and nations that reiterate one central truth at the expense of others. (The exercise of the imagination may look to them like denial or frivolity, as Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film The Lives of ...”

“... are not better than they were before the ceasefire. They are worse.’ Roddy Doyle’s Ireland may (O’Brien admits) look different to outsiders, and be notable for an absence of ‘wild Serbs or furious Croats’. Be not deceived. Just beneath this secular and European veneer dwells the ancestral dark: ‘God Land is in there, deep down. It whispers to ...”

“... less sympathetically on his compulsive rituals, facial tics, and the strange noises he made, which may have been symptoms of Tourette’s syndrome. In later life, Johnson told a friend that he had never tried to make a good impression on anyone until after the age of thirty, ‘considering the matter as hopeless’. He disliked speaking about his background ...”

“... indirect style, but his slightly stagey horror at the likely excesses of the first-person mode may nonetheless strike a chord with readers of a variety of free-running or confessional forms, not just novels (think Christmas circular letters). But what about autobiography or memoir? Surely here self-revelation is of the essence. Yet James’s stricture ...”

“... and seem not to have any market value at all. (Titanium implants and precious metal tooth fillings may be returned to the family after cremation or, under certain circumstances, sold off as scrap metal.) In the past, ‘resurrectionists’ used to dig up newly buried bodies to sell on to medical schools for anatomy classes, but the corpse’s next of kin never ...”

“... interference. The very existence of arbitrary power, however permissively or even benignly it may be exercised, reduces men to servitude; and free individuals can exist only in free states. The roots of the republican idea are traceable to ancient Rome and to the revival of republicanism in Renaissance Italy. Something like this conception of what it ...”

“... oddities of the current ubiquity of regret is how little political purchase it has. Politicians may regret their personal behaviour when it catches them out. But they rarely, if ever, regret their public actions, which they have been trained to defend at all costs. No, Theresa May says, I don’t regret calling the ...”

“... died a year ago, on 11 April 1987, to the dismay of his readers, and The Drowned and the Saved may well be the last of his writings to be translated and reviewed in this country. There was a time when it must have seemed to many that he would never receive a bad review, or even a cross word. His first book, If This Is a Man, about his months in ...”